If you’re trying to improve your underwater photography, one of the most useful things you can do is take photos on land. Doing so helps you get comfortable with your camera, with composition, technique, etc., and often leads to ideas for things to try underwater.

One thing I’ve been playing with recently is software to produce photographs that show a high dynamic range. Without going into too much detail, this basically means that your photograph displays a wider range of light values than normally possible.

This is accomplished by “combining” images taken at different exposure values, so you get detail in every part of the image, from the darkest to the brightest areas. This is really useful for times when there’s harsh light and shadows, and your camera would have a difficult time capturing the entire range of light values in one frame.

Here’s an example using Pasta as a model. The image on the left is an unadjusted, normally exposed image. The image on the right is an image created by running three images (bracketed at +1, 0, -1) through Photomatix software, using the tone mapping function.

The software allows me to create an image that more closely resembles what my eye saw. Our eyes are capable of seeing a much wider range of light than our CCDs are capable of capturing.

The obvious weak point is that the entire scene needs to be motionless in order to take and combine a number of images, so it’s not suitable for action photography. I don’t think I can use this underwater, but it’s fun to play around with it anyway.

You can download the software from the Photomatix site for free to try, but the resulting images will have a Photomatix watermark applied until you purchase a registered copy.

A larger version of the dynamic range adjusted photo of Pasta is here.

After much procrastination and many false starts, I’ve finally managed to update my main website!

Because I update this blog regularly, I’ve redesigned my website as a portfolio. For a start, I’ve put together five galleries, comprising recent photographs of humpback whales, marine organisms with their mouths open, reef scenes, fish and miscellaneous critters.

I had a few more in mind, but just putting these initial galleries together was quite a chore, with image sorting and editing squeezed in late at night after attending to everything else going on in my life. As a result, I’ve gone to bed cross-eyed and dizzy every night (actually, morning) for the past couple of weeks.

I did my best to keep the file sizes down, but I suspect that if your net connection isn’t very good, it might take a while to view the galleries.

Once I recover, I’ll work on additional galleries and updating the ones I’ve already put up. For now, I’m looking forward to getting a full night’s sleep for a change!

Events over the past week or so have been just shy of chaos. A lot of unrelated things have been happening at the same time, all requiring my attention.

My natural tendency to get distracted with new projects, ideas or interesting stories in the news hasn’t helped much either, as I often find myself several hours into researching a stray thought that crosses my mind in the midst of working on something else, which quite often was a tangent from yet another stream of consciousness.

As a result, I’ve spent much of my time at the computer or rushing to meetings, though I’ve managed to find time to hit the gym or go out for a run. In addition, Pasta reminds me twice a day, once early in the morning and once as evening approaches, that she needs to take me for a walk, so at least I’ve got built-in breaks.

Pasta also keeps me company when I work into the wee hours of the night, making sure I don’t get lonely (actually, she’s keeping tabs on me in case I get up for a late night snack).

In the midst of all this, I’ve coined a new term…Project Vertigo…to refer to times such as this when I’m juggling so many projects, thoughts, tasks and new ideas simultaneously that I literally feel queasy. On balance, I suppose it’s a good thing. Life is definitely interesting and my days are most certainly far from uneventful.

It’s the Golden Week holiday now in Japan, which is one of the few times during the year during which office workers can take vacation without fear of being ostracised, abused or otherwise sanctioned by their bosses and co-workers.

Japan, like many Asian countries, still has a masochistic office culture in which people pride themselves on never taking vacation, and where conversely, they abuse people who do. Circumstances have improved in the couple of decades that I’ve been coming here, but at its core, it hasn’t changed much.

Individually, most people admit it’s silly and largely pointless, particularly since much of the mandatory office attendance is devoted to face-time as opposed to any productive work. But collectively, it’s just the way things are. Everything in Japan is slow to change. This is no exception.

Anyway, the number of people travelling overseas for the holiday dropped significantly this year, something on the order of 20% or more. It’s a reflection no doubt of rapidly deteriorating economic circumstances, or perhaps more accurately, a continuation of the 20-year economic funk that Japan has been in, thanks to rampant corruption and a culture of accepting whatever the government does. Scandal after scandal, corruption case after corruption case, bumbling mistake after bumbling mistake…and still no change in government. Sigh.

The weather was brilliant this morning, so I took Pasta for an extended sit-in-the-sun session. Balmy weather + spring showers means dandelions have sprouted all over the place.

I remember as a kid finding hours of amusement blowing dandelion seeds around. Today in the park, all the kids had PSPs, gameboys and the like, showing no interest whatsoever in the yellow flowers or their feathery seed puffs, so it was up to Pasta and me be old fashioned and enjoy the dandelions.

This is an editorial (252 kB) that appeared recently in ultraMARINE magazine, a bi-monthly publication in the UK for aquarists. Also downloadable from my iTunes podcast.

Going through my photo library for a project last week, I came across this image of a black grouper (Mycteroperca bonaci) from my trip last year aboard the M/V Shear Water in the Bahamas. Much to my dismay, I was never able to find time to write about the enjoyable and educational trip, as I had back-to-back commitments lined up for some time thereafter.

Anyway, this was one of the non-shark encounters during the trip. This fish, along with another, seemed to “own” a section of the reef. They patrolled the area, swimming in a relatively predictable pattern. All I had to do was find the right spot to frame the image and wait. Sure enough, the big grouper came over to take a look…as nice and friendly as could be.

Besides picking the optimal location, the challenge photographically was to light the subject in a way to maximise visual impact. In this case, the key was to set the EV (exposure value) to be slightly underexposed, and to use a main light (not diffused, targeted) off to the left, slightly below and behind me to emphasise the line of the fish’s face. Aiming the light at an angle to avoid lighting the background reef was critical. If I had lit the reef behind the fish, there would have been a lot of clutter, which would detract from the main subject.

I used a fill light, diffused, set about 1.5 stops lower than the key light, above and slightly to the left-of-center to provide overall fill, again aiming the strobe to avoid bringing out the background.

Photo data: EOS 5D, f7.1, 1/125, ISO160, 17-40mm zoom lens, Z-220s x 2.

Last night, my blog suddenly went down with no logical explanation. I tried everything I reasonably could given that it was late at night and I was tired.

I checked to see if FTP was working. It was. I checked to see if email was working. It was. I looked through the folders and data via FTP and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong. I read reams and reams of explanations on my host’s support Wiki. In the end, I could find nothing to give me a clue, so I used the “Contact Support” function provided by my domain host and went to sleep, thinking that at the very least, someone would respond and point me in the right direction.

How silly of me.

Upon waking, there was no reply, not even a hint of the remote possibility of a reply. So, I sent another very polite request for help to understand the problem, and then scoured the web for possible clues.

Having no background or training in any form of coding whatsoever made this task a bit of a challenge. You know how instruction manuals are notoriously unclear and poorly written? Try reading technical help sites or support Wikis. Gibberish. Gobbledygook. And in many cases long-winded and grammatically incorrect to boot.

Pasta wanted to take a walk, so I went out for an hour to clear my head, and when I returned to renew the frustrating search for an answer, I happened upon another person who had the exact same problem as I did, just a few hours before I did, with the same host I’m using.

Fortunately, he had figured out a solution just hours earlier, and I read through his brief explanation, dug around a bit more, and finally hit upon the solution.

So, my site is back up, I’m somewhat less stressed (though in a pisser of a bad mood), and I can get back to doing more productive things. I still don’t fully understand why my blog, which has been operating just fine for nearly two years, went down without my making any changes to it (same thing happened to the other guy).

But there are no coincidences in life, and I assume that the lack of response from my domain host coupled with the similar experience by someone else means it was something done by the host.

In case anyone else has a similar problem, the host is Dreamhost, and the problem is with wordpress installations using the WP-Cache plugin, which, for whatever mysterious reason, suddenly caused a major problem which resulted in an error message coming up, instead of my blog.

If you have a wordpress blog and suddenly see this:

then go to your wp-config.php file and delete the line: define(’WP_CACHE’, true);

This cures the problem.

Coincidentally, it’s just about time to renew my hosting package. Hmmm, I how I’ll respond when the request for payment comes?

Playing around with multimedia software again. This is a short slideshow/ video of my recent trip to swim with Australian sea lions in Western Australia.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I’ve uploaded a version to my iTunes podcast, or you can right click here to download a higher quality quicktime movie (59.9 MB) if the mood strikes you.

This is an interview that appeared in DIVE Magazine in the UK recently. The main topic is an encounter I had with a juvenile sperm whale some years ago, one which left an indelible mark on me, fortunately in a good way.

Sperm whales are the largest carnivores on the planet. They have cavernous mouths with big, big teeth. I got a close-up look at both the mouth and the teeth, as Colin Doeg describes in the article (304kB).

Just reading the text, you might get the impression that I was calm, cool and collected. In reality, with an 11-metre predator literally on my fins, I was pissing in my wetsuit (to put it in an understated, PG-rated manner).

This version is from DIVE Magazine’s website.

It’s been 17 years since I’ve experienced the transition from winter to spring. I’d forgotten how wonderful this time of year can be.

The cherry blossoms, known as sakura, have been in full bloom for slightly over a week. The air is crisp and clear, sun proud, sky a perfect spring blue.

Breathe in the flower-tinted smell of renewal. You can’t help but feel refreshed, invigorated. Close your eyes, and the sounds of birds dominate…chirping, tweeting, squawking, squealing…harbingers of the new season.

The monotone and silence of winter has given way to a profusion of colour, fragrance and sound. I’d forgotten how wonderful this time of year can be.

A short video of Pasta’s road trip to the beach this weekend:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The Oxford dictionary’s online edition defines the term “flamboyant” as having as one of its meanings: “brightly coloured and showy”.

Metasepia pfefferi, commonly known as the flamboyant cuttlefish, is actually only occasionally brightly coloured and showy. Most of the time, it’s dull and drab, adopting the tone and texture of its background to remain unassuming.

I suppose calling it the “unassuming cuttlefish that occasionally shows off” would be more accurate, but it’s not quite as catchy as the cephalopod’s existing moniker.

Anyway, I came across this photo I took a while ago in the Lembeh Strait (It’s singular, not plural. Please don’t refer to the strait as the Lembeh Straits.). The photo’s nothing special per se, except perhaps that the cuttlefish is all lit up and perfectly posed.

Many marine animals that exhibit brilliant colouration are toxic. Blue-ringed octopuses, for instance, cultivate tetrodotoxin-making bacteria in their saliva glands, which is why their bite can be deadly. Mark Norman, who’s in charge of cephalopod research at Museum Victoria, pointed out a few years ago to me that flamboyants are probably toxic too. From what I understand, his research has since confirmed that the muscle tissue of this cuttlefish contains a unique toxin that’s as deadly as the blue-ring’s. Cool, eh?

Another interesting thing about this animal is that it walks as often or more than it swims, as illustrated in the photo here. Mark also speculated that the cuttlefish may be evolving toward walking as its primary form of locomotion. Who knows? Stranger things have evolved.

I’ve been laid up with a slight fever for a couple of days. Not a big deal, but it means I’ve been languishing in a general fog pierced by the occasional moment of clarity. I hate feeling so not-in-control, so I decided to do something productive and figure out how to encode and post video in Flash format.

To date, I’ve preferred using Quicktime because of better output quality, but sometimes people have trouble viewing Quicktime files, especially PC users. Plus, I received a few emails from non-Mac users who were unhappy they couldn’t view the PNG screen saver I made recently because it only works for Macs.

So, I still can’t make screen savers for PCs, but here’s a Flash video of the PNG screen saver. If you want the screen saver, you gotta get a Mac.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.